Last year I was part of a team of 5 people from 5 universities that wrote a paper on Universal Basic Income (UBI). The concept of UBI has been proposed as a tool to address poverty, inequality and unemployment. Our analysis incorporated these but took a slightly different approach and argued for UBI as a strategy to counter to the effects of Artificial Intelligence on the global economy.

If you’d like to check out our paper, you can download it at this Dropbox link

The abstract reads as follows:

Artificial intelligence, a term used commonly in computer sciences to describe machines able to make decisions and learn from those decisions, is rapidly entering our daily lives in the form of driverless cars, automated online assistants and virtual reality video games. In so doing, AI has already substituted some jobs that were previously thought to be impervious to technological development. Based on current research and estimates, this trend is predicted to be more pronounced in the future, leading to high unemployment levels in the society.

Our multidisciplinary analysis seeks to attack this problem head on and argues for the introduction of Unconditional Universal Basic Income (an unconditional, periodic transfer of money from the government to every citizen), accompanied by a reform in school curricula and retraining programs. Our proposal goes beyond mere theoretical discussions on basic income, and discusses ways to fund the proposed scheme and its political viability. Finally, we provide a practical roadmap that would see a government take our proposal from the “drawing board” and implement it nationwide in about one decade.

If you have any other resources you’d like to share, feel free to add them in the comments 🙂


Image was taken in St Gallen where I met the other 4 members of the team 🙂

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